Description
Book SynopsisThis volume explores the appropriation of the past in modern British culture. Today, at the beginning of a new millennium, the mass media would have us believe that Britain is suffering an identity crisis. If the pundits are correct, we are witnessing a manipulation of British history at the hands of those keen to project a new national imageor in the language of commodification, to rebrand Britain.
The twelve essays in Singular Continuities take a different tack. They argue that to distinguish between the new and the traditional in modern English culture often draws a false dichotomy, that British-ness, in fact, has been the product of continuous creation throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors strongly suggest that tradition derives from constant reimagining, if not from calculated invention.
Such reimagining has often assumed surprising forms. Thus, for example, at the end of Victoria''s reign, an enemy culturethat of the Boer farmer
Trade Review
"While each of these essays can be read individually, and a review summary cannot even begin to do justice to the richness of the themes and arguments that they contain, their collective impact is to provide a new level of understanding about the varieties and persistence of tradition and nostalgia in modern British history."—Albion
Table of Contents
Introduction George Behlmer and Fred Leventhal; Part I. The Politics of Nostalgia: 1. Land reform and the imagined past in nineteenth-century Britain Jamie Bronstein; 2. Reading radicalism/reading resistance: transformations and accommodations in suffragist discourse, 1890-1907 Laura Mayhall; 3. The long nineteenth century of British conservatism, 1880-1970 Reba Soffer; 4. The 1939 royal visit to the United States Fred Leventhal; 5. Autobiography, subjectivity, and memory: change and continuity in the practices of working-class selfhood Chris Waters; 6. Nostalgia, the heritage industry, and the London antiques trade: selling the past in Thatcher's Britain Howard Malchow; Part II. Tradition and Modernity: 7. Identity, immigration, and the state: Irish immigrants and English settlement in London, 1790-1840 Patricia Seleski; 8. The first world war as indicator of continuity and change in modern British sport John Osbourne; 9. 'Character'-building: continuity in social work practice, 1870-1930 George Behlmer; 10. Recasting the nation: change and continuity in 'the higher journalism', May 1923 Stewart Weaver; 11. Image and Englishness: Walter Benjamin, Humphrey Jennings, and modernity Michael Saler; 12. Vanessa's garden Susan Bell.
